Allison Tait

Allison Tait is professor of law at the University of Richmond where she teaches trusts and estates, family law, estate planning, critical theory, and feminist legal theory. Professor Tait joined the University of Richmond Law faculty in 2015. Before coming to Richmond, she was an Associate-in-Law at Columbia Law School. She also clerked for the Hon. Richard Palmer of the Connecticut Supreme Court and spent a year as the Gender Equity Postdoctoral Fellow for the Yale Women Faculty Forum.

Professor Tait's research addresses the regulation of family and household economies and the ways in which this regulation produces complex forms of inequality. Her research takes up questions of entitlement and dispossession and she writes about the ways that family wealth rules help to embed difference along the axes of gender, race, and class. She has written articles about the legal framework of high-wealth exceptionalism; the use of family trusts to safeguard social and cultural capital; and role of marriage in the creation of economic privilege. She is currently working on a project that pairs the legal governance of high-wealth families with that of families living in poverty and explicates how these polar economies of excess and extraction replicate colonialist formations.

AREAS OF EXPERTISE

• Trusts and Estates
• Family Law
• Charitable Giving
• Legal History
• Property
• Law & Literature

COURSES TAUGHT

• Trusts and Estates
• Family Law

Education

• Doctor of Law (J.D.) Yale Law School (2008 — 2011)
• BA Bryn Mawr College
• PhD Yale University

Companies

• Professor Of Law and Associate Dean of Faculty University of Richmond School of Law (2020)
• Associate Professor Of Law University of Richmond School of Law (2018 — 2020)
• Assistant Professor University of Richmond School of Law (2015 — 2020)
• Associate-in-Law Columbia Law School (2013 — 2015)
• Law Clerk Connecticut Supreme Court (2012 — 2013)
• Gender Equity and Policy Postdoctoral Associate Yale Women Faculty Forum (2011 — 2012)
• Law Fellow Center for WorkLife Law, UC Hastings College of the Law (2010 — 2010)
• Associate Director of Development Yale School of Management (2006 — 2008)

Presentations

"The Colonial Landscape of Debt," Intersectional Speaker Series on Gender and Racial Equity , Penn State Dickinson Law (March 2022)

"Inheriting Privilege," AALS Annual Meeting, AALS (January 2022)

"Legal Scholarship, Humanities Methodologies," AALS Annual Conference, AALS (January 2022)

"Family Trees and Family Fortunes," Financial Inequalities in an Unequal World, ACS Washington DC Lawyer's Chapter (December 2021)

"Debt Collection, Sites of Extraction, and Colonies of Wealth," Northwestern University Law Review Annual Symposium, Northwestern University Law School (November 2021)

"Family Trees and Family Fortunes," Nonmarriage Roundtable, Washington University School of Law (October 2021)

Presenter, "Queer Theory, Feminist Theory, and Technology," Law & Society Annual Meeting, (May 2021)

Presenter, "The Curiously Female Household: Re-imagining Domestic Power in Trollope's Novels," Law & Society Annual Meeting 2021, Law & Society (May 2021)

Presenter, "Inheriting Privilege," DC Area Family Law Workshop, Howard Law School (November 2020)

Moderator, "Wealth and Taxes: Will the ERA help?," Two Centuries of the Equal Rights Amendment, University of Florida, Levin College of Law (September 2020)

Presenter, "The Wealth of Families," Family Law Scholars and Teachers Annual Meeting, Family Law Scholars and Teachers Conference (June 2020)

Commentator, "Empirical Injustice," Law and Society Association Annual Meeting, Law and Society Association (May 2020)

Commentator, "Perspectives on Sex, Work and New Legal Orders," Law and Society Association Annual Meeting, Law and Society Association (May 2020)

Commentator, "Remarks on the new Oxford Handbook on Law and Humanities," Association of Law, Culture, & Humanities Annual Meeting, Association of Law, Culture, & Humanities (March 2020)

Presenter, "Trust as Patrimony," Law Faculty Colloquy, Boston College Law (September 2019)

Presenter, "Trust as Patrimony," Law Faculty Colloquy, Wake Forest School of Law (September 2019)

Commentator, "Emerging Interdisciplinary Scholarship in Trusts & Estates," SEALS Annual Conference, SEALS (August 2019)

Commentator, "Discussion Group: Topic Coverage of a Modern Trusts & Estates Course," SEALS Annual Conference, SEALS (July 2019)

Panelist, "Comments on panel entitled Finding Aesthetics in Unexpected Places," Law & Society Association Annual Conference, (June 2019)

Panelist, "Comments on panel entitled Planning for an Unstable Future," Law & Society Association Annual Conference, (June 2019)

Presenter, "Divorce Lending," Law & Society Association Annual Conference, (May 2019)

Presenter, "Inheriting the Family," Family Law Scholars and Teachers Conference 2019, Howard University School of Law (May 2019)

Presenter, "The Private Lives of High-Wealth Families," Shifting Normativities, UBC Allard School of Law (May 2019)

Presenter, "Divorce Lending," Law, Culture, and Humanities 2019, ASLCH (March 2019)

Presenter, "Confronting Injustice and Memory in the Public Square," AALS 2019 Annual Conference, Association of American Law Schools (January 2019)